President Obama launched a new initiative this week to further understanding on how climate change can influence human health. A key portion of this initiative is the release of 150 new health-related datasets on climate.data.gov to help researchers study the impacts of climate change on public health and to enable the private sector to develop tools and applications with this data to reduce these impacts. The datasets come from a variety of federal agencies including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and contain information on health issues that climate change could affect, such as food access and water quality. Later this year, the National Institutes of Health will host a national challenge for coders and researchers to use these datasets to develop new insights about the relationship between these issues.
Image: NASA Earth Observatory.
